Publikationer

African bureaucracies have attracted all kinds of – mostly negative – labels since the early 1990s: corrupt, ineffective, and expensive. The basis for such assessments has been thin. There has been little scholarly attention to the actual working of African state agencies.

The new book “States at Work” explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focusing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants. It tells a much more nuanced story about the dynamics of African bureaucracies. Adopting mainly an ethnographic approach as a basis for theorizing, the authors – which includes DIIS researcher Ole Therkildsen - deal with topics including: bureaucratic cultures and practical norms, operational routines in offices, career patterns and modes of appointment; how bureaucrats themselves perceive and deliver goods and services and interact with service users; the accumulation of public administration reforms and how the different bureaucratic corps react to the ‘good governance’ discourse and new public management policies; the consequences of these reforms for the daily working of state bureaucracies and for the civil servants’ identities and modes of accountability; and the space that exists for bottom-up micro-reforms that build on local innovations or informal arrangements.

Professor Robert Wade and Jakob Vestergaard's DIIS report on the gridlock in governance reforms in the IMF and the World Bank argues: "The western hegemony of the past two hundred years is ending as power shifts towards the east and as western states lose the authority to uphold a rules-based multilateral order. In the wake of the Great Crash of 2008 the G20 leaders took steps to bolster the multilateral order, including reform of the governance of the IMF and the World Bank. We show that the these reforms have substantially failed to meet their ostensible objectives. First, in both organizations the developed countries gained voting share relative to GDP share between 2009 and 2014. Secondly, countries continue to vary widely in their share of votes relative to share of world GDP; in both organizations some countries have six times or more the votes relative to GDP of others. Politicians and analysts should pay greater attention to achieving more equitable governance in these important multilateral organizations. At the end we show how this could be done."

In this paper Lars Buur explores linkage creation in Mozambique related to mega-projects in natural resource extraction and development from a political economy perspective. This new DIIS Working Paper explores the ‘best practice’ attempts between commodity producers and local content providers. The paper argues that a relatively elaborate state organizational and institutional setup based on policies, strategies and units with funding tools has emerged over time in Mozambique in order to begin to reap the benefits of large-scale investments in the extractive sectors. However, despite the formal acknowledgement, very little has been achieved with regard to forward and backward linkages, state institutions are often despite the official government rhetoric of importance simply bypassed not only by foreign investors, but also by the political leadership.

Gender and Land policies provide for the allocation of land to women - but have little impact on the ground. This DIIS Working Paper is part of a series on gender equality and land administration within the ReCom framework. It discusses Zambia’s dual land tenure system, the ways in which gender issues have been incorporated in legal and policy documents, and the extent to which this has been reflected in practice. It also examines the role of donors in legal and policy processes and donor support to civil society in relation to women’s land rights.